What is Debian?

Debian is an operating system which is composed primarily of free and open-source software, most of which is under the GNU General Public License, and developed by a group of individuals known as the Debian project. Debian is one of the most popular Linux distributions for personal computers and network servers, and has been used as a base for several other Linux distributions.

About this image

The amd64/debian:latest tag will always point the latest stable release (which is, at the time of this writing, amd64/debian:stretch). Stable releases are also tagged with their version (ie, amd64/debian:8 is an alias for amd64/debian:jessie, amd64/debian:7 is an alias for amd64/debian:wheezy, etc).

If you find yourself needing a Debian release which is EOL (and thus only available from archive.debian.org), you should check out the debian/eol image, which includes tags for Debian releases as far back as Potato (Debian 2.2), the first release to fully utilize APT.

Locales

Given that it is a faithful "minbase" install of Debian, this image only includes the C, C.UTF-8, and POSIX locales by default. For most uses requiring a UTF-8 locale, C.UTF-8 is likely sufficient (-e LANG=C.UTF-8 or ENV LANG C.UTF-8).

How It's Made

The rootfs tarballs for this image are built using the reproducible-Debian-rootfs tool, debuerreotype, with an explicit goal being that they are transparent and reproducible. Using the same toolchain, it should be possible to regenerate (clean-room!) the same tarballs used for building the official Debian images.

Image Variants

amd64/debian:<suite>-slim

These tags are an experiment in providing a slimmer base (removing some extra files that are normally not necessary within containers, such as man pages and documentation), and are definitely subject to change.

See the debuerreotype-slimify script (debuerreotype linked above) for more details about what gets removed during the "slimification" process.

License

As with all Docker images, these likely also contain other software which may be under other licenses (such as Bash, etc from the base distribution, along with any direct or indirect dependencies of the primary software being contained).